Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. (1 John 1:8) O God the Father, creator of heaven and earth, Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, who inspired Creation with the breath of your nostrils, who placed Adam in the…
For nearly a half-century, Sodom has been a key symbol in the American culture wars. On the one side, we have an aggressive movement among homosexuals that has first decriminalized homosexual conduct, then to force cultural and legal recognition of homosexuals as a minority and to normalize homosexual behaviors, finally…
Speaking of the Church, Romans 11:16-17 says, "And if the root be holy, the branches are also. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the root of the fatness of the…
At the end of Isaiah 61, Yahweh's Servant rejoices because the Lord clothes Him with salvation and righteousness. He decks Him like a bridegroom with a garland on His head. He wears jewels like a bride. He is a new bridegroom in a new garden of Eden, a garden of…
Before anything else, a word about “Torah” may be in order. I have been persuaded that “law” is a bad translation of “Torah,” even though it is evident that what is called “Torah” does have commandments, statutes, and ordinances in abundance. Why not “law?” “Law” as a translation for “Torah”…
Few novelists seem as innocent of the temptation to punditry as Jane Austen. Though living through a period that witnessed the birth of an independent United States, the French Revolution and the Terror, the Napoleonic wars and the rise of revolutionary romanticism, and the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, she…
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Postmodern reading is characterized by a hermeneutics of suspicion, but in this postmodern critics are adopting a stance (sometimes quite consciously) rooted in Marxist and Freudian theory. Butler says, “in concentrating on the notion of hidden contradiction, many postmodernists allied themselves to two highly disputable, and certainly totalizing, 19th-century ideologies.”
Butler argues that “many postmodern ideas” are “at best confused, and at worst simply untrue.” But he’s pretty sanguine about that: “the essential leading ideas of many cultural epochs are open to the same criticism” - he mentions the Romantic notion of Imagination or the fascination with mesmerism in medical…
Butler points out that postmodernism’s claims that grand narratives are passe is very culturally specific, even parochial, and cannot be sustained as a sociological claim: “allegiances to large-scale, totalizing religious and naturalist beliefs are currently responsible for so much repression, violence, and war . . . . It is obvious…
After reviewing some of the more radical proposals for a postmodern historiography, Christopher Butler, no friend to postmodernism, makes the sensible suggestion that “Postmodern relativism needn’t mean that anything goes, or that faction and fiction are the same as history. What it does mean is that we should be more…
In his midrashic/lectionary treatment of Matthew, M. D. Goulder suggests that “The three fourteens are to a Jew who had read Daniel six weeks of generations; and if six, then looking forward to a seventh, to make a week of weeks . . . . This, then, is to be…
In his midrashic/lectionary treatment of Matthew, M. D. Goulder suggests that “The three fourteens are to a Jew who had read Daniel six weeks of generations; and if six, then looking forward to a seventh, to make a week of weeks . . . . This, then, is to be…
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